James Duff Brown was an infl uential and energetic librarian in Great Britain
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Subject Classifi -
cation has characteristics that were unusual and idiosyncratic during his
own time, but his work deserves recognition as one of the precursors of
modern bibliographic classifi cation systems. This article discusses a number
of theories and classifi cation practices that Brown developed. In particular,
it investigates his views on the order of main classes, on the phenomenon
of “concrete” subjects, and on the need for synthesized notations. It traces
these ideas briefl y into the future through the work of S. R. Ranganathan,
the Classifi cation Research Group, and the second edition of the Bliss Bibliographic
Classifi cation system. It concludes that Brown’s work warrants
further study for the light it may shed on current classifi cation theory and
practice.

Issue Date:

2004

Publisher:

Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.